Exploring St. Paul's past through the pages of the Pioneer Press.

A little girl playing tag with a friend along Selby Avenue on the evening of May 28, 1903, became the first pedestrian to be killed by an automobile in St. Paul.

The Pioneer Press carried the news of 8-year-old Arania Max’s death on its front page the next day.

“We were playing wood tag,” her friend Sadie Mundt told the newspaper. “Arania ran into the street away from me. I saw the automobile coming and I shouted: ‘Arania come back. See the automobile.’ It wasn’t going fast; just like a street car. Arania ran towards me and she was knocked down by the wagon just near the sidewalk.”

The automobile’s driver, 24-year-old Horace Irvine, said the crash, which took place on the stretch between St. Alban’s and Dale streets, was “purely accidental.”

“I blew the horn at the street crossing and twice again when I was approaching the children,” he told the newspaper. He had only owned the vehicle, which cost him $2,500, a short time. Irvine was not charged with any wrongdoing.

“As far as I can see there was no criminal negligence on the part of Mr. Irvine,” County Attorney Thomas Kane told the Pioneer Press the next day. “There was certainly no intent on his part to injure the child. Twelve miles an hour would not constitute criminal negligence. An extraordinary high rate of speed, say thirty miles an hour, would be called criminal.”

In an editorial on May 30, 1903, the Pioneer Press admonished parents about the dangers of allowing their children to play in city streets, which were increasingly used by automobiles. The newspaper also called for speed limits and new laws governing who may operate “these flying ‘devil wagons.’ ”

“No doubt ‘the automobile has come to stay,’ but it should be permitted to stay only under conditions that shall make the use of the streets by people who don’t own automobiles as safe as it was before,” the newspaper’s editors wrote.

Kane might be surprised to learn that the speed limit on St. Paul’s urban streets — including Selby — is now set at the “criminal” rate of 30 miles per hour.

On April 15, 1865, the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination crackled across the wire at North-Western Telegraph’s offices in downtown St. Paul.

Telegraph operator B.A. Squires received the text of a letter written by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which gave a brief but gripping account of Lincoln’s shooting at Ford’s Theatre the night before, and the apparently fatal stabbing of Secretary of State William Seward. Then nothing — the line went dead.

The St. Paul Pioneer carried Stanton’s letter at the top of its front page the next day with a note assuring readers that, despite trouble with the telegraph, its report on the assassination contained “all the material facts.”

The telegraph did not speak again until two agonizing days later, when it transmitted the full details of the president’s death and the ongoing manhunt for his alleged assassin, popular stage actor John Wilkes Booth. False reports of Seward’s death — he was stabbed, but survived — persisted.

Half an hour later, Chicago newspapers carrying the same information arrived in St. Paul by riverboat.

Pioneer editor Earle Goodrich passed along these updates to readers in his April 18 issue, with a note condemning the telegraph as “a disgrace to its owners,” Kenosha, Wis.-based North-Western.

“The telegraph to this place is about the slowest institution we have,” the note said, adding sarcastically that “we must give lightning the credit of beating the steamer thirty minutes in the race from Hastings.”

It’s interesting to note how quickly local news gatherers took for granted this new technology, which had been introduced to St. Paulites less than five years earlier.